let's begin with the bouquet from michael merck to be laid where terry rests,

THE WASTE LAND BY T.S. ELIOT BY MICHAEL MERCK
21090282
i keep thinking there is a tool somewhere
to the place of no return
the taste land
the fire's ermine
birds' unsets
For Terry Plumming
1 Burial of the Dead
April is the Lilacs out of Memory, breeding the dead mixing desire
Dull roots of the cruellest month, stirring with spring rain.
and land Winter kept us forgetful
warm, covering Earth in feeding A little life with dried tubers.
snow Summer surprised us,
coming over in the colonnade, we stopped And went into a shower
And drank, and talked for an hour.
{Trying hard to see} in rain of sunlight: the {Hard garden of} coffee {had been
elected by the Russian-come-stamina of a milk wetted Dutch mustache}
And when we were With children My cousin was frightened.
he took me out on a sled,
ANd I, He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight [to] 's. And down we went.
In the mountains I read,
there you feel free much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots of that stony rubbish?
clutch this Son of man branches out grow what You cannot say,
or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images,
And the dead tree relief,
And the dry stone no sound.
where the sun beats There is shadow,
the cricket gives no shelter,
Only of water under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock).
And I will show you Your shadow at morning Or your shadow at evening,
different from either
something striding to meet you, rising behind you; in a handful of dust.
I will show you fear[,] 'You gave me the hyacinths first[...]
{First went the Wind
Then your Hazmat was
Mine Kerchief Kind
Woe Whilest did you?}
a year ago; 'They called me the hyacinth girl."
Yet we came back, late, from the garden,
Your arms hyacinth full, and your hair wet,
I could not Speak when my eyes failed, I knew nothing Looking into the heart of neither Living nor dead,
and I was the silence and light {of the seer of mirrorshit}.
Madame So so tryst Had a bad cold,
famous clairvoyante, nevertheless, is known to be With a wicked pack of cards.
the wisest woman in Europe.
Here, said she, Is your card (s implied),
(Those) Sailor of situations,
the drowned are pearls that were his eyes. Look!
Here is the lady of The Lady Belladonna,
Here is the man with the Rocks,
And here is the one-eyed Wheel,
three staves and hear the merchant,
and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see.
I do not find The Hanged crowds of people.
I see Man walking around in a Thank you ring so careful [of] the horoscope.
If you see dear Mrs. Etiquette, Tell her I bring Fear [of] death by water.
One must be myself; these days.
Unreal City,
Under a brown crowd of fog flowed over I had thought,
winter dawn, A London Bridge,
death had undone so many, so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, And each man fixed Followed up To where Saint stroke,
With a dead sound, stopped him crying before his feet were exhaled;
'Stetson!" on the final of nine.
his eyes kept the hours down the hill and King William Street,
There I saw one I knew, Mary Woolnoth, and 'You who [were] with me in the ships in your garden!'
'at Mylae, That corpse you planted last year, Has it begun to sprout?
Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost kept the dog far hence?'
'O disturbed its bed? that's a friend to men,
'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
'You hypocrite lecteur! –{my own knife} –{my bane}!'
2 A Game of Chess
The Chair she sat in Glowed on the marble Held up by standards from which
a golden glass with fruited vines peeped out,
(Another had his eyes like a burnished throne, where the glitter Wrought
Cupidon Doubled the flames Reflecting light upon her jewels)
The sevenbranched candelabra behind his wing rose to meet it,
From satin cases behind his wing poured, in rich profusion, vials of ivory
Unstoppered.
and of the table, as In, coloured glass, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes[.]
Unguent, powdered, or liquid– And drowned from the troubled, confused
window,
freshened the sense in odours; stirred by the fattening air these ascended
In the prolonged candle-flames That flung their smoke into the pattern,
the laquearia Stirring on the coffered ceiling.
framed by the coloured Huge sea-wood burned green and orange, swam a
carved copper dolphin In sad light,
fed with a stone Which above the antique mantle was displayed as though
a window gave upon the sylvan scene The change of Philomel,
So rudely forced.
yet there by the barbarous king the nightingale Filled all the desert with
the still world And other withered stumps of time
And [with] inviolable voice she cried 'Jug Jug' to dirty ears;
words Were told upon the walls,
the room enclosed, footsteps shuffled under the brush,
Under her hair the firelight pursues staring forms,
leaning out, Leaning, hushing,
fiery points Spread out,
Glowed into then on the stair in.
and still would be savagely still.
'My nerves are bad to-night. 'Speak to me
Yes, bad. Why do you ever speak thinking.
Stay with 'What are you thinking of?
What thinking me?
Speak What.
me.
'I never know what What you are Think thinking.'
I think we are the dead men Where lost their bones in rats' alley.
'What is that noise?'
The wind under Nothing.
'What is the wind doing? What is that now noise?'
again, Nothing nothing.
'Do
'You know remember? Do you see the door?'
'Do you nothing Nothing?
I remember[!]
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
'Are you nothing in your head? Is there, or not, alive?
'O It's so elegant
'O So intelligent
'O what shall I Shakespeherian?
'What, shall I walk the street?
'O that I do now, With my hair down so
'I shall rush out as I am and do–Rag the hot water at ten.
[But] 'What shall we do to-morrow?
'What shall we ever play Pressing lidless eyes waiting for a knock upon the game
of chess.
And And and, if it rains, a closed door car at four.
When I didn't mince my words, Lil's husband got demobbed, Now Albert's coming
back,
I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
I said– make yourself a bit smart, He'll want to know what you done with You teeth.
he gave you the army of four years, that money,
he wants a good time,
To get yourself some.
Have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
I can't bear to look at you.
He did, I was there. He said, I swear,
I said, and think [of] poor Albert,
He's been in And if you don't give it him, there's others will
I said. Oh is there, she said.
Something o' that Then I'll know who to thank, I said, she said, and g[a]ve me a
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said. [(}straight look[)]
Others can pick and choose if you can't.
But if Albert makes off, You ought to be ashamed, I said
it won't be for lack of telling to be so antique. (And her only thirty-one)
I can't help it, she said, It's them pills, she said.
pulling a long face, I took to bring it off,
(She's had five already and nearly died of young George The chemist.)
it would be alright, but I've never been the same.
You are a proper fool said, I said.
Well, If Albert won't leave you alone, HURRY UP PLEASE, get married
for if you don't want TIME alone there it is, I said,
ITS children?
Well, that Sunday, they had a hot Albert gammon, And they asked me to dinner,
What you was home [?]
,to get the beauty of it – hot––ITS HURRY
HURRY UP PLEASE UP PLEASE ITS TIME TIME
Goodnight.
3 The Fire's Ermine
The river's tent is Clutch and Crosses
the brown land departed.
the last broken fingers sink into the wet unheard.
The wind of leaf nymphs are [a] Sweet bank.
The river Thames bears my song,
empty ends, bottles Silk, sandwich papers handkerchiefs, cardboard cigarette, boxes of testimony,
no run softly till I end, Or other summer nights.
The nymphs are departed.
And their directors,
the loitering City of heirs,
have left no addresses. Departed[.]
By the waters of Leman A rat crept softly
I sat down and wept...
Sweet Thames, Sweet Thames, run softly, run softly till I end my song, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a rattle of chuckle spread the bones [in a] cold blast,
I hear from ear to ear, The the, and
through the vegetation
its slimy belly Dragging on the bank.
While fishing my brothers wreck, in the dull my father's death before him,
[a] White naked gashouse On a winter evening,
I was the canal Musing round upon the king
And on the king bodies on the low damp ground
And behind the bones, year to year, time to time,
I hear The sound of motors and horns cast in a Rattled rat's foot,
which shall bring a little low dry garret.
But only at my back from Sweeny to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
{if you have a child's chant now is the time to couple!}
Twit Jug
So Tereu rudely forc'd.
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of Mr. Unshaven, a winter noon with a pocket full of currants Asked me To luncheon
the merchant documents at sight the violet hour at the Cannon Street Hotel
when in demotic French, Followed by a weekend, Turn upward the eyes and back.
At the desk, when the human engine waits Like a throbbing taxi,
I, though blind when between two lives, can see At the violet hour;
throbbing breasts that strive, Tiresias female, wrinkled evening,
the Old man brings the sailor home from combinations
waiting with typist food,
sea The home at teatime
Homeward clears her lights, and lays out perilously spread[s] touched by the sun's rays,
Her drying Out of the window hour
and Her stove On the divan
piled Stockings are slippers, camisoles, and stays in tins.
I Tiresias, (at night her bed) with wrinkled d[r]ugs
and foretold the expected guest–– the scene
the old man Perceived the rest I too awaited.
He, carbuncular, young man arrives the small house As a silk hat assurance
A agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
low of the One millionaire guesses whom sits on a hat.
The time is now propitious as The meal has ended,
she is bored, and he tired [of] Endeavors to engage her in caresses Which are still unreproved,
if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults His vanity hands Exploring encounter no response,
defence, at once, requires no welcome of indifference.
And makes [the] bed [instead].
(I Tiresias have Enacted all foresuffered on this same divan;
I who have sat by Thebes and walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows a final patronising kiss,
And gropes the stairs, finding his unlit way. . .
She turns and, Hardly aware of Her brain, looks a moment in the glass of her departed lover;
allows one half-formed thought to pass;
"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."
her room again, alone, Paces about to folly on the gramophone,
stoops her hair with automatic hand And smoothes lovely her She.
'This music crept by me upon the waters'
O City city, I can sometimes hear
The pleasant walls Where the Martyr lounge
And a clatter of Inexplicable Ionian white
and gold noon whining of a public bar
a chatter from within
along And Beside splendour and fishermen
Street, Street Strand Of Lower mandolin.
The river sweats woman
Oil barges drift
and tar the turning tide
With Red sails Wide
To spar leeward, heavy on the swing.
Past the Isle of Dogs
Drifting logs reach
The Green Down
w[h]ich the barges wash The record
{Well la tee da la dee day}
Elizabeth Beating Leicester
and oars The stern was formed
A gilded gold shell
brisk Red swell
and The shores Rippled
both wind South west
Carried down stream
The peal of White towers
bells
{Well la tee da la dee day}
'Trams bore me
and dusty trees Undid me.
I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of the narrow canoe.'
'My feet are at my heart.
After the event He wept.
He promised, "a new start."
Under my feet
I made no comment.
What should I?'
'On sands resent
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken people of dirty hands
fingernails My humble people who expect
Nothing.'
la la
I came to Carthage then
Burning O Lord
burning Thou pluckest
burning O Lord
burning Thou pluckest me out
burning
4 Death by Water
Phlebas the Phoenecian Forgot the cry of profit and loss,
a fortnight dead and the deep sea swell gulls.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. He passed as he rose and fell
the stages of his age and youth
Entering the Gentile or Jew whirlpool.
O you who turn the wheel, Consider Phlebas who was once handsome and tall as you,
and look windward.
5 What the Thunder Said
After the torchlight
After the frosty silence
After the agony
The shouting and the crying Prison
red gardens on sweaty faces in stony places
palace and reverberation
Thunder living over He who is now dead
spring [over] We who are now living were distant mountains dying
With little patience
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and The road among the mountains
no water and the sandy road
mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry
If there were only water
Dead mouth of carious teeth
feet are in the sand amongst the rock that cannot stand nor lie nor sit
Here There is not even silence
the mountains sterile without rain thunder,
There is But dry solitude
not even spit
mountains Which are winding above mountain[s]
But red mudcracked sullen faces sneer and snarl From doors of houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the dry grass singing the cicada
But sound of water over rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
Who is the third sound high in the air?
I do not know whether man or woman
Who always walks beside you?
There is always that Murmur of maternal lamentation Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle
When I count [the] endless plains, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road, What is that on the other side of you?
Who are those hooded hoards swarming over,
who is walking beside you, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the Falling towers flat
horizon only over the mountains reforms and bursts the city in the violet air
Cracks
Unreal
What is Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London
A woman drew bats And fiddled with baby faces
her long black hair music
tight strings beat their wings in the violet light
out Whistled a blackened wall upside down
towers crawled [out] of empty cisterns and Tolling reminiscent bells, kept the hours
And voices singing exhausted wells
head downward In this decayed hole
whisper among the mountains
In the faint air were tumbled graves
the grass is singing about the chapel.
There is the empty moonlight Over the wind's home.
Only the chapel windows harm no one.
and the door swings,
It has no Dry bones
a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga Waited crouched
humped in silence and limp leaves
the black clouds Gathered far distant
Then spoke the thunder
aD
{Data}: what have we given?
My friend, The awful daring of a moment's surrender
blood shaking my heart
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this and only this we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or under broken seals
Or in the memories draped by the beneficent spider
In our empty rooms, the lean solicitor
aD
{Datahymn}: I have heard the key
Turn in the door We think of and turn once only each in his prison
the key Thinking of the key
aethereal rumours Revive, Only at nightfall a broken {Chorus}
aD
{Datasoliloquy}: The boat responded
Gaily, The sea was calm
your hand to heart, expert when invited,
Gaily beating obedient, expert, To controlling sail and oar with hands
I sat upon the lands in order
shore with the arid plain behind me
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling
down
{For nil is fucked if infinity is soulless} ––O swallow swallow
{The Prince of remnants are the arbor of Aquinas}
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then you fit ill {Dynamo's} mad engine.
Data. Datahymn. Datasoliloquy.
{Shit} {Shat} {Shut}

rotten milk:
I don't have very much to say about the production of the first Terry
magazine. The early months of 2004 were unseasonably eventful. Life was a
total whirlwind, sensory overload in the best possible way. Terry was
happening, my involvement with the buddY. art space in Wicker Park was
blowing up, and most overwhelming of all, I was in the early days of a
relationship with Eleanor "Soft Serve" Balson, that would turn out to be one
of the most important friendships I'd ever have. It was also during this
time that I played my first show as a part of The People's Republic of
Delicious Food. It was the group's last show. Terry's birth and the PRDF's
death were one and the same. At one point during the show, Ralph climbed out
of a giant paper-mache cocoon covered in goo and what I believe was macaroni
and cheese. He made his way across the room, and he and I collaborated on a
soundtrack for the event. This was the first time we played music together.
Everything was exciting and everything was happening all at once. I am sure
there were bad scenes happening, but I was blind to them until I came home
to Eric dry-heaving from anxiety three hours before the release party for
the first magazine.
From the very start, we had a motto. A mantra, if you will. It was this:
"Don't stop thinking about Terry Plumming." The longer Terry Plumming kept
happening, the less this sounded like a battle cry and the more it sounded
like a curse.
ralph barton:
Good luck ever getting your hands on a copy of this one,
brother. The first issue of terry plumming magazine was black and
white and the art work was presented in pretty much the form it was
created, i.e. no crazy collages, no weird printing effects, just raw
line art and found images.
The visual effect is pretty similar to musical world of the
first six or so catalog releases. Painfully honest, terrifyingly
underproduced.
Putting this magazine together was a fucking nightmare.
We originally got a quote for the printing (from this one dude
tim who tried to fuck us and will burn in hell), at like seventy
bucks,
I think the run eventually ended up costing us more like seven
hundred. Big difference, and scrambling last minit to come up with
cash while the job was at press wasn't cool
I recall not having too much to do with the layout. I think I
might have done and early mockup of the book, but certainly the
finished product had many hands on it.
I didn't see the final product until after it had gone to press so
there are a few things about the first terry plumming that i've always
wished I could change.
About half of the drawings in tp01 are things I made while
employed by the chicago public school system as a substitute teacher.
There are no credits for the visual content which is good in that it
gives the work that "where did this come from!" outsider mindfuck,
but..... well I harbored sour grapes for a while longer than I'd care
to admit 'cause I wanted to get popular and have self-esteem In the
end I was vindicated, but not for any reason that I would have come up
with at the time Terry should have credited the visual artists the
same as the sound artists terry kept them hidden until bacon,
Eric was so freaked out that by the morning of the release
party he was puking nerves then he was all mad cause everything was
getting done wrong and or badly at the last minit and he was shitty
to be around and the release party sucked I didn't know anyone\ and
`I pretty much just sat at the merch table and stuffed cd envelopes
Potlatch ceremony bitch citchwhile Eric and Rotten Milk seemed to be
in a competition to see who could give away more magazines they acted
like utter fools giving away stacks of product to every dingwit who
could make them feel cool I guess it kinda worked 'cause terry got
popular fast but I lost money and Personally my life was fucked. I'd
moved out of the apartment I had been sharing with my wife and into a
former whorehouse above a package goods store. There I shared my life
with tilly and andy. Tilly is the ex-marine, former underwear model
who became my collaborator on the maze releases tpr10,18 and 39.
Andy, is a talented painter who's friendship I destroyed by
fucking his estranged wife simone. Fucking you roommate's estranged
wife is a thing you should do if you sincerely feel like there are
not enough hellishly uncomfortable moments in your life
The cd starts with a song I wrote. That gave me a lot of initial
confidence. Probably set me up for later disappointments and feeling
slighteds. I'm not all that emotionally stable and sometimes have bad
thoughts.
eric graf:
as alluded to in the intro, we knew nothing about making magazines. all
of the effort went into the making the image of the magazine and not into the method it
was going to be distributed, or made public, this seemed at the time secondary,
and in its own way kinda defined the terry distro model: hand to hand combat.
it was a run of 500,
not printed by terry, even though very soon after this magazine terry then
did all of the printing 'in-house', meaning we ran the presses, made the
plates/films, it was real hands on after this one. this one is real hands
off. not to say that we didn't have our handlers around to hold our hands
through the rough times, when things started to get really complicated.
no hostages. i remember it being grueling, working with ralph and rotten milk,
we we're all quite insane about the making of it. i myself was completely
ocd over the whole thing, i was quite sour. nothing seemed to go right,
the bleeds were all wrong, a process large enough to seem confusing, or
atleast it was at the time. (its a layout in quark! hahah!)
looking back on how hard it was to make something
this simple is really baffling memory. and i think its great, weird ideas, it has
the proto nonsense handling on it, that early pre-collage just say one thing
at a time kinda feel. the compilation is inspirational (in the strictly dan layne sense
of the word) most of it coming from
inside the newly terry built house of cards. as with all the compilations rotten milk
had a hand in its great.

rotten milk:
One of the ideas inherent in all of the Terry stuff, indeed one of the only
aesthetic constants from issue to issue was that everything was supposed to
fall apart. The first issue had pages that fell out when you opened it. The
next three were just packages full of things to read, hang up, draw on or
lose. There was a part of Terry that hated the idea of art being worth
something or being collectible. This was the part of Terry that giggled
uncontrollably to himself every time he saw someone open up a Terry thing
and immediately weird shit starts flying everywhere. Terry Plumming media
was made to self-destruct. In retrospect, so was Terry Plumming itself.
We had a meeting at the Skylark to talk about the prospect of touring behind
Terry. There were disagreements that quickly escalated into an
out-of-control argument. It was embarrassing. There people being
unreasonable and people telling people that they were being unreasonable.
The arguing was cyclical and getting us nowhere. You know that point in an
argument where you realize that no one is going to win, that everyone is too
heated to even consider the possibility of the other person being right and
the only way to deal with it is to leave? That happened. I realized then
that there had been nothing funny about the arguments I had witnessed
between Ralph and Eric. It was immensely frustrating. Eleanor and I left the
meeting with sour tastes in our mouths. It was the first time that I was
aware that this was going to be a recurring problem. I didn't really know
what to do.
ralph barton:
the second terry plumming magazine was the fix that got me addicted.
I'm really inordinately proud of tp02. I got to have a say in
everything- press, paper, ink, packaging, layout. this was a
LOT harder magazine to produce but so much better. Most of my
favorite images made it to press, and this time I didn't have as much
of a backlog of drawings and we had a bunch more contributions so
there is a real feeling of harmonious synergy. tp02 is the first
real example of terry plumming visual style.
this cd has some tracks that Doug R recorded at my house. I like them
a lot but they wig a lot of people out.
eric graf:
i agree with everything ralph says above. here i'll add something about
the terry plumming nonsense procurement process. mostly this is how it
went: i would spend my days going through other people's garbage, and i
think everyone else involved with the creation of images had just about
the same technique. we we're looking for the diamonds in the trash, the
stuff that was dismissed as either boring or so commonplace as if invisible.
use the everyday. spam, pictures of our fans cocks and tits, unknown writer
correspondence, sharpie, michael merck/ralph barton/rotten milk/neil whitacre
drawing styles, boyle collage, soft serve cunt tv, a great
ausikaitis drawing used at a micro scale on secretary of state letterhead,
schedules, buffalos, smoke and flesh.
a note on the prints themselves: the paper this was printed on was manufactured
sometime in the mid 70s, it has a high cloth content. its really nice and
durable and very darkly brown. these are two color prints, black and boxing
poster pour in metallic ink style direct on press, giving it a copper and green
acid induced rainbow feel. the manilla envelope sheath gives a nice contrast to
what it encompasses, a killer cover image from michael merck (the tomato weight
lifter in nowhere operating room). this magazine came with wide width.
a note on terry plumming naming conventions: when nobokov was asked how to
pronounce his last name by an american journalist this is what he said, "i will
not tell you how to say my last name, i will only tell you that my first name
rhymes with redeemer." this is just one clue. the names for the magazines
are purposefully picked for their forgetting power, their ability to be read
and quickly forgotten. this is an actual power.

rotten milk:
I had sworn over and over again that I would never live at buddY., but the
situation living with Eric was getting more and more tense. He was bad at
handling stress, yet prone to creating stressful situations for himself. He
was freaking out often, and more and more I felt the negative energy
directed at me. So when Ringo asked me to move into buddY. one night at
Maria's, I found myself saying "yes" before I'd even had a chance to think
about it.
In retrospect it seems like a forgone conclusion. I cannot imagine my life
being even remotely similar had I not lived at buddY. any more than I can
imagine what it would have been like had I not met Eleanor or had I not met
Terry. These are the things, the people and the places that made me into the
person I am.
buddY. was a large loft space on a loud street right in the heart of Wicker
Park, a "cool" neighborhood that was gentrifying quickly. It couldn't have
been any more different from the quiet street with lots of trees inhabited
mostly by Polish and Mexican immigrants that I was moving from. Long before
I moved in, I had made myself at home. I was helping out with all kinds of
art shows, rock shows and fashion shows. I was heavily involved with Lumpen,
a magazine I had idolized as a teenager that operated out of the space. The
residents had grown used to the sight of me passed out in a corner, on a
couch or in a spare bed. But I really liked the contrast... hanging out for
a couple of days in the middle of all the craziness, but still going home to
some quiet place when I couldn't take it any more. This is something I would
learn to live without. I guess it was obvious to everyone but me that
eventually, I would move in. By the time all my stuff arrived I was already
hosting a weekly improvised music series (Improvise with your buddY.) and
operating a pirate radio station (WPBR) out of the space. I don't think I
was kidding anyone but myself.
Moving away from the south side really brought to light a shift in the Terry
production dynamic that had been happening slowly since the start. As I grew
less and less interested in being a visual artist, I grew less concerned
with the visual content of the magazines. I had a say in the matter and I
always new what was happening, but I was keeping more and more of a
distance, primarily focusing on the music end of things. I had realized that
the more I distanced myself from the magazine's production, the less likely
it was that I would have to have another of those arguments.
Terry came to buddY. though. We were invited by Edmar to transform the
buddY. space as an installation for the Select Media Festival. The buddY.
Cave was noteworthy in that it was the first time we had worked together to
create something other than a magazine or a CD-r. When Terry worked on an
installation or a performance art piece, this -- in my mind -- was when
Terry worked best. Which isn't to say there weren't spats or arguments. Just
that they were less abstract. They were about something real. The buddY.
Cave was a fairly obvious installation; Ralph says he's made something like
it dozens of times. Still it was totally effective. We covered the walls
with this weird green fabric, fucked with the lighting, hung a lattice of
string from the ceiling from which we hung more green fabric and a bunch of
computer keyboards and mice. We got fucked up and drew nonsense all over all
the fabric and hung strange Terry-esque objects in strategic places. It was
totally immersive, completely transforming the environment. It was also
pretty fucking dangerous, a total fire trap in a place where if you told
someone not to smoke you might as well be speaking in a made up language.
At the end of the last night of the festival, everyone at the party
destroyed The buddY. Cave. To me, it was an amazing, cathartic experience.
To destroy something beautiful that I had worked hard on making... to do so
with a lot of drunken, excited friends... it was enthralling. When I woke up
Ralph halfway through the destruction, he did not agree. Instead, he flipped
the fuck out. Ranting and screaming, he made his way through the remnants of
the cave. Party people had climbed to the top of the lattice and were
bouncing furiously, determined to make our makeshift ceiling fall. Ralph's
cries fell on dead ears. Everyone was too caught up in the moment to listen.
Sure, I understood why he was upset. But I didn't really understand. This
installation, just like everything else we'd made, was designed to fall
apart. To give something an end is to make it complete.
ralph barton:
this one is also amazing. Sometimes as an artist you nail it.
I got to lock minds with mike merk for months on one single image.
I don't believe there is another art object like this in the
history of the world tpo3 came with a special print. me and mike, we
worked for three3 months on the image and then printed it in a most
unusual way. we used dot matrix printers with their ribbons removes
loaded with carbon form feed paper to create an edition of 300 five
page blind carbon prints we ran 4 printers for 48 hours
non-stop while we were printing the blind carbon, we also spray
painted the magazine covers let's see, four stencils, 300 magazines, a
thousand cds (also labile with spray paint) an unventilated warehouse
we were so wacked, the sound of the printing was like little evil ice
gnomes inside the forehead the first two tracks on this rule hard.
when I got home my girlfriend punched me in the face and dumped me
eric graf:
before or after this, i don't know which yet,
the writing in tp3 is great, michael did most of it. there is a lot of
writing in terry plumming. ralph and i were just on the phone talking
about the archive and he asked if it would be possible to print the archive
into a book and i said sure if you download the bittorrent file and burn
a dvd of the pdfs you could take it to kinkos and have them make you one
with a nice little perfect binding and all. of course i would recommend
putting a bit of a leader at the bind edge since the archive was not built
with the intention of making a book, but it would work. i think i might
do that, just to reread terry in book form. i think the writing is plain
damn good and michael did a killer job on tp3. ralph and michael made the
cover of this one, a fedex envelope. i don't know where we squeezed those
out of but we had about 500 of them. latex paint and many cans of spraypaint
later they were totally one of a kind. it seems like maybe tp3 was about (wait
a second who am i kidding here, myself obviously) things that took a long time,
as in making magazines took a long time and who knew? not us!
also: i can't believe the memo in this one wasn't a larger news story. not
to mention the secret decoder included with it what extra dimensions could
they have provided the news media at a time when they needed a hand most. if
only news, specifically local news, would have contacted terry... the world
would definitly be a different place.

rotten milk:
Sometimes when things die, they give birth to something new. The PRDF gave
birth to Terry and The buddY. Cave gave birth to the Terry Towwels project.
This is one of my favorite objects we ever made. It is understated, there
are no crazy printing tricks or anything. But it is a cool object
nonetheless. A bunch of strange pieces of paper wrapped in a funny green
cum-rag, each adorned with the face of Terry Love (the man whose website
about plumbing is the forth thing that shows up if you Google "terry
plumming") and covered with odd markings. It is the most limited run of any
of the magazines we made and the most difficult to keep all in one piece. Th
emoment you untie it, it explodes. It is also probably my favorite of all
the compilations (also the only one without any of my music on it). There is
a certain cohesion to it... I can't really say why I feel this way. I just
do.
Ralph started coming over and insisting that we start a band. We started to
practice fairly regularly, which basically meant we set up a lot of gear in
the main room at buddY., got real fucked up and jammed casually. When he
heard this was happening, Eric started coming over and recording our
sessions.
This was a change in the way we did things. Most of our previous releases
had been reissues of weird CDs our friends had made just for the sake of
making them. Things that we thought other people would like, so we made more
of them. Now we were entering the territory of producing content so that we
could release it. I spent many a night that winter helping Marc "Safety Pin"
Arcuri realize an idea he had for an album involving tape loops, samples and
chopped up drum recordings. Eric recorded something like ten hours worth of
me and Ralph fucking around, which I waded through and chopped up and
edited. The result was "Difficult Listening," the 70-plus minute debut
release from our new band, creatively titled Rotten Milk vs. Bubblegum
Shitface. The name of the album, incidentally, is appropriate.
By the time we played our first show, very little of the gear we had used to
make the album -- most of it hardly functional to begin with -- still
worked. We practiced constantly up until the day of the show, developing
that psychic connection that all good improvising musicians have. We played
to a sold-out audience at the Empty Bottle and then we never practiced
again. Rotten Milk vs. Bubblegum Shitface, though hardly a "real band" in
the traditional sense, was something different for me. It was a step away
from the nuanced and academic approach of free improv and a step toward the
loud and ugly aesthetic of noise music that was just starting to grab some
people's attention... avant-garde music more informed by punk rock than by
the likes of Anthony Braxton or Tony Conrad.
This burgeoning movement would rear its head a little more each time I went
on tour. The winter of 2004 also marked my second attempt at touring and my
first attempt at booking at tour. The Rotten Milk/Soft Serve Winter
Blunderland Tour was an unmitigated disaster in every sense. But I did learn
some valuable lessons. Like how not to book a tour. Or why you shouldn't
book shows in the mountains in the winter. And why you should never go on
tour alone with your lover.
By the end of the winter, Eleanor had broken up with me. The next day I
played a show to a sold-out audience at the Bottle for the third time in six
months. A few days later I caught pneumonia for the forth time in my life.
Guess that's just the way it goes.
ralph barton:
I can't really remember how towels started. I remember mike
and eric were living together and they had this idea of packaging a
magazine in a cum rag. I didn't really have much art content in
towels and I don't think I did any of the layout. I do remember one
early meeting at the skylark where I suggested that we use the
leftover fabric from the buddy cave, which was taking up space in my
pad. Mike claimed to have some killer deal on brand new white towels
and I was made fun of for my lame idea. Well in the end, Mike had his
numbers wrong and we ended up not being able to afford real towels.
We used the fabric from the buddy cave and it looks great.
eric graf:
not much to say about this that hasn't already been said, so i'll say a little
about my relationship with rotten milk. its had its ups and downs for sure. i
love him a little and i hate him a little. when the times got tough he would
bail on terry and when things were going good he was terry's friend, but in the
end terry would be garbage without him. in a collaboration not everyone's
involvement is going to be the same, different people bring different things
to the table, sometimes someone brings something to the table no one else can
and that is what rotten milk did when assembling the majority of the compilations and
delivering to terry's door many of the releases. so i feel he didn't have the stamina
needed to pull the allnighters to get the terry work done that needed to be done,
the without which there is no terry, it might look easy, but it isn't, so
one compilation showed up 12 hours before release, so his tendency to keep eyes
on his own ends got in the way of productivity, so fucking what. so it was hard,
i think he made it harder, he think i made it harder, i still feel he delivered more
times than not, how many people can you say that about? are they your friends? no one else would
have booked those terry tours, no one else would have stared into the abyss
that is touring noise in george bush country and keep going back. making terry was not
something i could just walk away from no matter how much it made me cry, and i
blamed others when they did walk away, and for that, what can i say, nothing really.
rotten milk and ralph and michael and dan layne and the hosts of others, there isn't a better
group to tie it down with. i love these people. i love
rotten milk, and i'm sorry, but damn dude, why did i have to repeat myself so many
times before you got it? will you ever forgive a no quitting no apologies manic obsession?
bless these wonderful people in my life whose lives i make a living hell, to you all, i apologize,
what am i to do when the shit is hitting the fan, as if there was a machine
like one of those tennis ball shooters that shoots shit instead of balls at the
fan, it just whirrs away, its made of metal, what does it know?, its sentience isn't
a question. sometimes i feel like terry plumming's only fan.

rotten milk:
The Terry Plumming Summit may be my favorite thing we ever did. Things were
about to fall apart for Terry Plumming, but before they did so, we really
made our presence known. It was a triple-tiered event, as part of the
Version>05 festival. One part was an attempt to make a recording of 100
musicians improvising together inside of an 80 foot pentagram. Another part
was a psychedelic-drug fueled picnic and typewriter chorus in McKinley Park.
It was a beautiful day, there were two-dozen typewriters and two-dozen
people each reading from multiple texts. It made no sense at all. It was
fucking beautiful. That one reporter from Northwestern University was so
damned confused. The third event was the Historic Summit Photograph
Reenactments, wherein festival-goers took the place of politicians in
recreations of photographs of assholes shaking eachothers's hands at
bullshit like the G8 peace summit. There was a professional photographer
with a big flashing light and an umbrella, a large moonscape backdrop and a
few inflatable dinosaurs. These events were so successful because they
walked the line between the absurd and the passionate so well. They were
exceptionally dumb ideas, taken seriously, well-excecuted, carried out to
the fullest extent possible.
Speaking of dumb ideas taken to the most extreme end imaginable, there was
Tina. From the very start we knew we were going to make Tina. We always knew
it was the stupidest thing we could possibly do, and we always knew we were
going to do it. There was no getting around it. From the very start, when we
got together to talk about Terry, we would always pull out this defaced Tina
Turner tourbook that Eric had found at the Skylark and smoke weed and laugh
our asses off. It never ceased to be funny. Perfectly reproducing a couple
thousand copies of the Tina Turner tourbook, all graffiti in tact turned
out to be the only thing that could make it stop being funny. It was also
the thing that made doing Terry Plumming stop being funny. Although I had
little to do with the actual production of the magazine, I still felt the
fallout. I had seen Eric get mad and mean before, but never anything like
this. Tina was the thing that pushed him over the edge. Part of me is sorry
that I ever suggested it to him. The other part of me knows that this is the
only way it ever could have happened.
buddY.'s lease ran out in the summer of 2005. Rather than find someplace to
live, I planned a nine-week tour of the United States for Rotten Milk vs.
Bubblegum Shitface. Also facing the prospect of homelessness, Marc Arcuri
agreed to join us. My newfound friends Rand Sevilla and Nick Bahr agreed to
take their project Carpet of Sexy on the first half of the tour. Eric
convinced Dan Layne to buy Ralph a 20 year old van to take us around the
country. "Ambitious" is a word one could use to describe our plans, if one
was to be kind. "Idiotic", "haphazard", "stupid" and "doomed from the start"
are also words. Though the idea of going on tour with your band and two
friends' bands initially sounds appealing, it turns out that it is damn near
impossible to find people willing to set up a show for three touring acts
they've never heard of. This is the sort of thing that seems really obvious
in retrospect. It sure doesn't help if you're playing the least appealing
music imaginable. Or if you're trying to book said shows in a part of the
country you've never ever visited before.
The best thing I can say about the tour is that it could have been a whole
lot worse. Though there are people who might disagree with me. One of them
is Stephany Colunga, an old roommate from buddY. who had been living in
Mexico for a year or so. We picked her up in Austin and travelled across the
desert, up the west coast and then back to the midwest. The van broke down
on at least three different occasions, at least two of which could have been
fatal were it not for some very well-timed bursts of very good luck. We ran
out of money three weeks into things yet somehow we kept managing to keep
going. Not all of the shows sucked. Some of them were even good. But there
were enough stinkers to warrant a new rule: If there were less than ten
people in the audience, we would forgo our individual acts and all play
together. This was much more entertaining for us than watching the same show
we'd seen night after night. Such was the origin of the band Amerika'z Meth
Problem, which eventually matured into a real thing... a crazy formless loud
raging kind of nonsense, complete with costumes, vague compositions and even
a few sequels. A year later, when I saw the band Skarekrau Radio play for
the first time, I was floored. It was the band I had always wanted AMP to
be, but they were actually pulling it off. Still, we had some good shows. We
earned a reputation for spectacle and danger and silliness. It felt good to
have earned a reputation for anything at all.
We returned to Chicago for a five-day hiatus in the middle of the tour. The
first place we stopped was the Diamonds space in Bridgeport. Located on the
first floor of the Texas ballroom, it was just off of I-55. We rolled into
town and rolled into Texas and we rolled a joint. It was strangely desolate.
Everyone had moved out, explained Myles, who was squatting there till she
could find a new place. While she was explaining this to us the landlord
showed up. He looked around, shook his head and told us he'd come back
later. Everyone laughed and kept on smoking the joint. buddY. and Diamonds
and Camp Gay were all closing. It was the end of an era. Meanwhile, while we
had been gone, a bunch of kids a few years younger than myself had opened up
a new space right down the street from buddY. called Hey Cadets! They had
had one show before they were shut down by their landlord. Liz Armstrong had
written about the show in the Chicago Reader. The headline said something
like "Hey Cadets! out-debauches buddY." The landlord showed up at their
place the day after it ran, article in hand, pounding on the door and asking
whoever answered it, "What's a buddy?"
I told my new friends about the Diamonds space... about how they had all
moved out, about how the landlord didn't care if people had shows or
squatted there and smoked weed. They needed a space right away. The day
after we left they went over and checked out the space. While we were gone
on tour, they signed a lease and moved in. When we came back, it was our new
home.
It was bittersweet to find people still living at buddY. It was good to play
a final show there that totally rocked and it was nice to have a place to
sleep for a few days. But part of me was annoyed. I had already said my
goodbyes.
Marc refused to go on the second half of the tour, so me and Ralph headed
east on our own, meeting up with Julia "Insect Deli" Gilman for a few days
around New York City. The van broke down again in upstate New York and when
we finally got it going again, we refused to stop till we got to Philly.
Somehow we got the work done on it affordably and went on our way, picking
up a casual acquaintance named Chris Carly from the Greyhound in Philly.
Chris had a project with our friend Jason in St. Louis called HTEETH. During
the first 48 hours he was traveling with us, I received phone calls asking
for three different people. They all turned out to be him. "What do you want
us to call you?" we asked him finally. Half-jokingly, he replied "Genitals."
I don't think he expected the name to stick. It did.
ralph barton:
TINA is awesome. Sometime early on in terry, I came back from a long
trip overseas and dropped in on Rotten Milk and Eric. Eric showed me
the original copy of tina, which was found, exactly as published, in
the skylark. At the time we had no idea who were the responsible
artists. I wrote out a contract (do YOU smell drugs?) signifying my
desire to see TINA printed in mass and toured behind in Europe by me
rotten milk and tv pow..... Regrets? I have a few. This thing
really bit me on the ass.
TINA is the most perfectly fucked thing ever. It shouldn't exist.
I near I could tell Eric just decided to print this on his
own. At one point, after things were already underway, I remember his
asking me if we should or shouldn't do tina at that time. I told him
no, we should not but that we were going to anyway, even though it was
wrong.
TINA was the first time I really broke. I can put up with a lot of
bullshit and still see though it to produce great art, but early on
I walked away on a 'fuck you' Eric had a terrible habit of becoming
a vicious psychic monster at exactly the worst possible moment. I
know this about him and can accept & love him as a friend but in the
moment he causes hurt. I always felt there was this air of "here, I
printed this, now you do your part and make this blow up" And I
always wanted to honor that. But there was poison in the gift. The
bitterness is in TINA.
Terry plumming was in no way prepared to capitalize on TINA.
We lacked any promotional deal, any marketing, no booking, nothing,
just contacts with some DIY'ers and college radio station.
Eric got dan layne to buy me a 30 year old van and me rotten
milk rand nick and mark arcurry departed on a national tour, fifty
plus shows in 60 days. More than anything else that has happened to
me during the course of my adult life, this adventure irrevokably
changed my life. I broke over and over. I've never really rebuilt my
mind, like a chair repaired that never sits right.
People really fucking hate themselves in the midwestern states.
It's murderous cold in the winter, and dangerously hot in summer.
There's cops everywhere and all the pretty, smart, or popular people
got out as fast as they could so all the old people are scared wusses.
Midwestern noise music is the best in the world. The sound of an
impotent man trying to destroy hell or himself- no intellectual, no
sensory delights, not art terry plumming is as raw as the racist joke
your uncle made you laugh at even though your best friend was black.
TINA is waterboarding on Fox news every night, lies about cars and oil
and fucking, lies about the sacred nature of music and partying.
Fuck You mainstream media you feed us shit and we smear the walls
of our cages with it.
TINA was too good. Top printers have to have it pointed out to
them that TINA is a flawless reproduction of a defaced mid-80's tina
turner tourbook not an actual defaced mid-80's tina turner tourbook.
It makes sense. I mean why on earth would terry go to such lengths to
present the joke and spend no effort letting you in on it?
The gift? Grow a brain.
eric graf:
i don't want to say too much about tina because i've never spent any time
explaining it to anyone and i don't want to start now, the document stands
up quite well on its own and to say anything might fuck something up, who knows?
tina is the high watermark, the terry moment distilled. its like a man who
flashes his dick in the street at a bunch of school kids, there is something
wrong with him, right? no chance at rehabilitation, right? right. no chance.
there is not a person on earth who will look at tina and will react with a,
'yeah, right, that's right'. that person doesn't exist. but this is the mind
of terry plumming we're talking about, he said, 'yeah, that's right. run it,
spread the message, this is the thing.' for terry, the message cannot be
refined any further, the only way to make something better was to make something
bigger, and well, that still didn't work as hard. there is something to be said for
getting it right not the first time but getting it right at all. man does it
look good. many people have asked me, 'where did you get all those tina turner
tourbooks and how many sharpies did you use?' and i have to say, 'look man,
isn't that sharpie so real looking, didn't terry nail that print sharpie.'
i guess i'm admitting terry is a streetflasher, which isn't far off, if you
consider washing yourself with a squeeg from the gas station across the street
after mudwrestling on the roof at eleanor's, all the while trying to get into
the club, streetflashing, past children's curfews and all that.

rotten milk:
We came back to Chicago, our spirits broken and our finances just plain
broke. Me and Ralph were both homeless and we decided booking another tour a
couple months down the road was easier than finding a place to live. Funny
that we could go through one of the most harrowing experiences of our lives,
only to immediately decide to do it again. At a show in Akron Ohio, we had
met a duo called Occasional Detroit. They were a near-emaciated black couple
playing a totally demented form of noisy hip-hop, with lots of arguing
onstage and gear malfunctions. It was impossible to tell what was a part of
the show and what wasn't. We had talked to them about going on tour. They
were into it. I guess their lives were just as dead-end as ours, so we set
about making it happen. Meanwhile, Ralph and I had a new magazine to make.
Completely fed up with Eric, I suggested to Ralph that we make the new issue
of Terry Plumming without him. I was convinced that he was the problem. I
wanted to kick Eric out of Terry. This would not work though. Because in
Eric's mind, he was Terry.
One of the initial difficulties in producing the new issue of Terry Plumming
turned out to be this: neither Ralph nor I lived anywhere. Although there
were plenty of places to stay, primarily at the new Hey Cadets! spot,
neither of us had a place to make a new product. Inspired by Tina, we were
going to make 600 reproductions of a defaced pizza box we'd found in the
garbage a few days before the end of our tour in Columbia MO. We were going
to fill it with reproductions of maps and directions we'd collected on the
tour, screen-printed on top of line-art Mike Merck had made inspired by our
descriptions of our travels. It was another terribly ambitious project that
was destined to fail, but by this point ambitious projects destined to fail
were par for the course.
It was during the production of the Pizzatlas (as we called it) that I began
to fully understand the nature of Eric's neurosis. I can honestly say that
very few people have ever been as nice to me as has been Eric Graf at times.
But I can also honestly say that no one I care about has ever been more
cruel to me. Ralph and I came to know Eric's Mr. Hyde persona as The Beard.
You do not want to encounter The Beard, as he is a terrible, terrible
person. You sure as shit don't want to fuck with him. The Beard is the most
mean, unrelenting, totally unreasonable asshole I've ever met. Lacking a
place to work, we started to make the Pizzatlas at Eric's house. However
Eric was rarely home. And the beard often came to visit.
Eric was upset that I was trying to exclude him. Rightfully so, I suppose.
Still, he almost refused to acknowledge it. He let us work in his house, but
he made sure the work was impossible to get done. Every night he would come
home to us hard at work and berate us, telling us we were doing everything
wrong. Helping out some, but also putting obstacles in our way. The
Pizzatlas is the only issue of Terry Plumming that was released incomplete.
it is also the only issue where Eric was not at the helm of its production.
It is during the production of the Pizzatlas, an already impossible task,
that my camel's back was broken. There is a part of me that will always love
Eric Graf very dearly. But there is another part of me that is forever hurt,
that will never be able to forgive him for the way he treated me and my
friends. I knew, the day I stormed out of Eric's house screaming at him,
sobbing uncontrollably, telling him to fuck off and go to hell... I knew
that day that Terry Plumming was destined to die.
We went on tour with an unfinished Pizzatlas, with Occasional Detroit and
Jail from the Coughs, who was in the process of developing her solo act.
Jail is a wonderful, talented, loving person who happens to be a woman
trapped in a large man's body. She wears dresses and big fake boobs. Oh,
what a sight we were, rolling out of the van to go to the gas station in
South Carolina... me and Ralph, psychedelic road-wearied travelers with
overgrown beard and stinky ugly clothes, followed by a tiny black couple
that couldn't stop arguing with eachother for thirty seconds if the fate of
the world was at stake and a tall funny man with tits. Jail's act was called
the Portable Blake for a few days. She renamed it Sportsmen Against Hunger
and then eventually Carezza. It consists of her playing a circuit-bent casio
and screaming. If you ever have a chance to see it, you should. It is really
great.
And so was the tour, for the most part. Sure, there were ups and downs, but
it was the first time I'd been on a tour where most of the shows were well
attended and everyone was nice to us and excited to have us around. Trading
tour contacts with Towondo from O-D worked out really well for all parties
involved. It was like the pay-off for all the disastrous tours I'd been on.
And it was a fabulous contrast to the hellish time we'd just had in Chicago.
The tour ended in Atlanta. We dropped off O-D; they were relocating there.
All we had to do was drive back to Chicago. it was the day after
Thanksgiving. We had actually made money going on tour. It was astounding.
It was incredible. It was therefore not that big of a surprise when, 45
minutes north of Chattanooga, our van's engine exploded.
I don't care to go into the details of the three days I spent living in a
motel in central Tennessee with Bubblegum Shitface and Jail, save to say
that we found a really good pizza dumpster and I saw Jackass The Movie for
the first, the second and the third time in my life. It was one of the most
hopeless times I'd ever lived through and it cost us a shit-load of money we
didn't have and although we did make it back to Chicago, me and Ralph's
spirits were as close to broken as they had ever been and we were
way-the-hell in debt. If you've ever had something happen to you that sucks
so much all you can do is laugh, that's how I felt. The rest of the winter
was damned near impossible. If it weren't for a short lived and unexpected
love affair with an old friend, I don't think I would have survived.
I was homeless and hopeless. In January of 2006, I went to central Missouri
to live with Cooper Crain and Steven Haslag from the band Warhammer 48K at a
house in the country about 8 miles outside of Columbia. I felt lost. It was
a thing to do. I made a lot of new friends and I learned to forget. I was
learning about how to stop thinking about Terry Plumming.
For some reason I had made plans to travel to Miami in the middle of
February to go to the third annual International Noise Conference. Never
mind that I had no money and no means of transportation. As the day grew
closer and closer, I became painfully aware that there was no way in hell it
was going to happen. I ate a lot of acid and did a bunch of soul-searching
and decided that it was okay. Who cares if all my dumb plans failed and if
all of my ambitions were for naught? All of my friends would still be my
friends anyway. The sky wouldn't fall. So what if I failed? It's not the end
of the world. What if, instead of going to Miami to represent Terry Fucking
Plumming, I just continued to hang out with my friends in this peaceful
slow-paced town? It sounded alright to me. And then, one night Eric called.
"How are you going to get to Miami?"
"I don't think I'm going anymore."
"What do you mean you're not going? Why aren't you going? You have to go."
"I can't go. I don't have a ride to Miami and I don't have any money."
"Well what if I find you a ride? What if I send you money? How much money do
you need?"
What the fuck was I thinking? Why would I possibly consider such an offer? I
think about people in stories who make deals with the devil. They're at the
end of their rope. They have nothing left to lose.
Eric went to Quimby's, the one store that had always sold our products,
faithfully, no questions asked. He gathered up all of the money they owed
Terry form our consignment deal. He sent it to me: a few hundred dollars,
along with a car and a driver. The driver in question was an autistic
ex-marine with severe mental disorders named Matt Tilly. He is one of the
most obnoxious and annoying persons I have ever met. Eric had solved my
problem, but he had had done so in a way that ensured that I must spend the
next ten days of my life in a small vehicle with a raving lunatic I could
not stand. Somehow, this seemed a fitting allegory for the last few years of
my life.
ralph barton:
This wrecked it. I came back destroyed and never really
repaired. No apartment, I bounced from crashing here to there,
getting kicked out, or run along I even landed back at my parents.
ATLAS starts with the tour. I had collected all the little directions
and scribbles that had accumulated in the van. The plan was to print
red and green collage layers over mike's black line drawings on blue
paper. I remember the conversation with eric brainstorming this as
being really great and inspired. That was the last nice eric. This
was about the time we really got to know the beard. Never have I
tried to do so much work with so much antagonism. I did the initial
scanning and photoshop work at eric and mike's loft during the world
series, which was going on right down the street.
Really we wanted to make another magazine but without Eric's shitty
alter ego, the Beard. I'm not the world's most responsible person.
Nor am I consistently possessed with good judgment. I am capable of
sitting in a bad situation for a seemingly infinite amount of time,
letting the pot boil over and over and over. Wrecking my life and the
lives of those in any proximity. We should hang out.
Eric had become such a consistently shitty person, totally unable
to let go of past injuries that I had come to the decision that I was
going to do as much as possible to push terry while having as little
to do with Eric. The environment was mean and I felt sabotaged at
every turn. Oh yeah I was living in Eric's house slash out of Bluey.
Me and rotten milk were homeless after tour. Eric baited rotten milk until he caused
the rift that will never heal, pointlessly stupid pointlessly mean.
The staggering hurt that could never be addressed. A large deeply
wounded, very dangerous animal.
I got in way over my head with the printing. My head was chopped
off. I never got the printing done. The images in the archive are
digital re-creations, mock ups of image sets that would have looked a
lot messier but would have been singular rotten milk and I left on tour,
heading east to Omaha with unfinished pizza atlases. They sucked to
tour with. Mike was sour with me because the version we released
only contained his drawings, which are great but they were never
intended to be anything more than a layer in a larger composition.
Naked Sorry Big Bulky, Dumb Bad Taste in Mouth.
The Recently completed a digitally finished version of
PizzaAtlas, that I'm quite proud of. My bad feelings are buried under
a mountain of dirtweed ash.
The music on this compilation is great. The touring really paid
off in terms of increased quality of submissions.
eric graf:
after the total success that was tina, and the work that went into it that exhausted
me completely, i gave ralph and milk the reigns. what a stupid fucking thing to
do. they were in no position to work for this organization with the insanely lofty
goals that terry lived and died by and they will tell you as such, even though
accounts differ. i did everything in my power to limit the
release of this magazine, even going so far as to burn copies i would find, the
ones in the vaults still awaiting the fire, well we'll see. there is really no
way to describe how very different my philosophy on the making of terry media
differs from ralph and milk's. as far as i saw it, they just didn't have the
strength to see a complicated, exhausting project to its natural end, completion.
it didn't seem to matter to ralph that he would waste 3 days refining prints only
to not print them, and then for only lack and bad planning. i was really sick of
this issue when i saw that this was the way things would be run, if you could
call it running, i call it complaining and concessions to waste. in the archive
for the first time you can view a complete pizzatlas, and its fucking great, ralph swallowed
this failure in the way only ralph can and revisted it and put it all together, i'm stunned.
it really captures those dark american days of the war of terror, the stripmall
society going down the tubes. it actually says something, too bad the builders
didn't have the will to to frame out a door when the barbarians were at the door.
now with all that said, whew (wiping sweat from my brow, i have been working on this
archive for 3 months and let me tell you it feels good to be staring at the finishline),
everytime something is completed there is always someone who takes the reigns and gets
it done to completion or completion would never happen. working with other people is
different. there is a lot of wasted time. anyone who runs an orginization (by oneself
or with others) can tell you there are moments when you feel totally alone, no one to
talk to, no one who can understand why you work as hard as you do, no one who can
understand the belief. and the relief that follows, almost a drug in itself to see
something completed correctly. but like ralph says, but this is something YOU could learn.
creating a monster or creating a new tradition, creating a public entity; this is not
going with the flow. the flow doesn't need anymore leaders. going against the flow is
painful, but there are always better ways to go against the flow. you learn this.
wait, no, again, YOU could learn this.
lucky for us who access the archive to see it as it was intended?

rotten milk:
The winter passed and I wound up back in Chicago. I moved into a house with
Rand from Carpet of Sexy and rotten milk Hedges. It had lots of names... No
Dumpling, the Garbage House, the Christopher Meadows (named after a
long-term couch-surfer dude). But the name that stuck was The Blog Cabin.
Rand had a propensity for naming stuff. He decided that the summer of 2006
should be called The Summer of Bad Ideas. The name stuck. And so did the
implications.
Wanting to keep on doing Terry Plumming but also wanting to steer clear of
Eric as much as possible, I made some money and decided to put out a seven
inch record. One side of the record was Rand's band Carpet of Sexy. The
other side was It's A Trap, a band starring Max Brotman & Jesse Short, two
of the dudes that had put me up at Hey Cadets! I booked a summer tour for
them. They bought a tour van. It was supposed to be my way of repaying
Carpet of Sexy for going on a shitty tour with me the year prior and my way
or saying thanks to Max & Jesse for letting me crash with them for so long.
The tour was a total disaster. There were unenthusiastic audiences and long
drives. Everyone in the van hated each other. By the time they got back to
Chicago it was clear that both bands were going to break up. It's a Trap
didn't even show up to their last show. Score one more for Terry Plumming.
Meanwhile, Ralph and I had big, stupid plans of our own. Somehow, Terry had
transformed into a competition to see which person could make the biggest,
dumbest mistake. Who could fuck up their lives the most?
I don't know... It sure as shit seemed like a good idea at the time to save
as much money as possible (it wasn't enough), buy a 1948 40-foot city bus on
eBay and send Ralph and his girlfriend train-hopping across the country to
pick it up in Oregon and drive it to the house of a total stranger that
somebody said would convert it to run on waste vegetable oil out of the
kindness of his heart. What could possibly go wrong?
I was done working with Eric, but what the fuck... The last issue of Terry
had sucked and we all knew it. And who wants to go out with a whimper? So we
conceived of BACON-7, a twelve inch record with bizzaro-dance remixes of old
Terry stuff, a CD-r with new jams and a whole bunch of beautiful high color
posters. Eric worked on the visuals and the CD and I worked on the record
almost completely independent of one another. It actually went down pretty
smoothly. It is the best looking, best sounding, most complete thing that
Terry Plumming ever made.
The poster for the BACON-7 release said "Terry Plumming is dead. Long live
Terry Plumming." I'm pretty sure we were kidding ourselves. It's like that
thing that happens when you are dating someone who is really bad for you but
no matter how many times you break up with that person you end up back
together with them. That thing is an unhealthy thing to do.
It took a long time and a lot of borrowing of money and a lot of long hard
nights, but Ralph and Megan and the guy who knew how to do it succeeded at
getting the bus to run on waste vegetable oil. They said their thank-yous
and their you're welcomes and their goodbyes and they took off, headed back
to Chicago. Just outside of Salt Lake City the bus's engine died. I received
a phone call telling me this 10 minutes before I was scheduled to perform a
solo set at this years' Select Media Festival. I proceeded to have a nervous
breakdown on stage, ranting non-sensically into a microphone and breaking
most of my gear, before running off to hide in a window art installation
where I cried for a half hour while Ringo held me and said nothing. Most
people present were not phased. They just assumed that it was performance
art.
But it wasn't that bad. Ralph and Megan scrapped the bus and made back most
of the money we'd spent on it. They made it back to Chicago, we repaid our
debts an Max and Jesse let us borrow their van to go on tour. The other two
acts, Waterbabies and My Fairy Prince, backed out at the last second. But
what did we care? Me and Ralph had come to expect everything to go wrong all
the time. But we'd also learned that it was almost impossible not to
persevere. So we drove out of town, BACON7's in hand... prepared for Terry
Plumming's last tour ever. Prepared for everything to go wrong one last
time. And you know what? It didn't.
Eveerything went more or less okay. We did it. We played a bunch of shows.
And they went well. And we sold a lot of merch. And people dug it. We got
fed up with eachother and had a couple little spats, but it all played
itsself out in the music and by the next day we were always fine. We had
finally figured it all out. We finally made it work. We ended the tour back
at home with more friends and more money than we'd left with. And you know
what else? The van didn't even break down.
post-BACON
After that there were a few more attempts at collaborative projects. There
was the Terry-wrist Training Camp, where Version fetival-goers were
kidnapped and brainwashed. There was an ill-fated trip to an art festival in
Texas. But none of these things really succeeded at recaturing the magic.
Terry was done, and anyone who couldn't see that was only kidding
themselves.
When things reach their natural ends -- and this is it. This is the end. --
people like to ask questions like "If you had the chance, would you do it
all over again?" I think these are stupid questions. I think a more
applicable question is "Do you regret it?"
For all the bullshit that came along with doing Terry Plumming, I do not
regret it.
I learned more from Terry Plumming than I have from almost anything else
I've ever done. I gained some friends and I lost some friends, but such is
the nature of life. And I also scored experience out the wazoo.
Terry Plumming is dead. And I'm okay with that. I think about Ralph Barton
emerging from a cocoon covered in goo and crawling across the floor, a trail
of slime behind him. I think about this and I wonder to myself: what comes
next? I wonder, what nature of beast will the reincarnation of Terry be?
I think about it, and I am as terrified as I am excited.
ralph barton:
I think I understand why terry plumming failed to blow up outside of
Chicago. But I really don't understand why BACON7 failed to sell
out. I lost somewhere around five thousand dollars in my part of
releasing and touring behind terry plumming's most ambitious project.
I have two guys I'd really like to be friends with hounding me for
money I can't seem to pay back. I know eric isn't fucking me on this
one 'cause there's boxes of copies of BACON7 taking up space in his
apartment, unsold. Peter Principle. Not worth it. So infinitely
horrible. A month of freezing nights in the desert, every day begging
the telephone for more money...... Touring behind , BACON7 i
experienced the hell of unrelenting suicidal visions closing my eyes
to full cinematic visions of stepping in front of moving trains guns
blowing my head off. As we were heading west out of Asheville, down
out of the Smoky Mountains, I Eric called me to tell me that John
Renniger had died. Had been my mystic mentor popping up in my life
during the time 1996 on he put me in my first out of college art show,
curated my early zines in to library archives turned me on to the real
life of artist BACON contains the last published work he ever approved
in his lifetime I cried for days like I have never cried for any human
life I'm crying right now uncontrollably BACON is our epocal statement
on fuck you boring reality greedy stupid american asswipes
I'd like to brag and point out that BACON as well as everything terry
ever did was totally DIY the only thing we ever out sourced was the
vinal mastering and pressing. DIY is the whole point of terry
plumming. You can push yourself hard enough to break through the
walls of ordinary reality. You can do it yourself better than anyone
else at every step. Everyone can, all the time. Eric did all the
printing himself and the pre press too. It looks as good as any art
book in the world. You can do that. It's absolutely intolerable to
accept one iota of American stupidity. BACON is a giant fuck you to
the impotent lame culture BushCo had been foisting on USA cows, us.
I took the photos of graffiti in Warsaw. I particularly like the one
line cat drawing, they were every where.
eric graf:
oh boy, its big and bold and expensive and handsome and complete and its the end but i didn't
know it at the time. there is no way to make another terry plumming magazine after bacon, it
just achives and i love it. a note on printmaking: as i've said, when terry started no one
involved had any idea how to actually make a magazine let alone how to operate the machines
used to complete those tasks. by the time bacon happened i was printing everything for terry
in house, diy, and man, that has really changed my life. i really love printmaking and i probably
would have never found that out had it not been for terry. leading up to terry i was playing
around with 4 color process but just doing the standard stuff. i didn't know how to make
masking tape print to actually look like masking tape for example. during and after bacon
i figured this out and the importance of learning this has changed the way i look at everything,
it has changed the way i use my eyes. when i first started making print i told michael
one day that i didn't think my eyes worked properly and he got a kick out of this and used
it against me many times in regard to the way things looked or atleast my interpretation of
looking. the result: i trained my eyes. i don't know of any school that teaches this, well for that
matter i don't know of a school that teaches anything) and i can
only assume that for those who have gotten to this place with their eyes they will understand, but
for everyone else let me say it will be an individual battle, and for some it will be a battle
you will fight maybe for life and never win; keep fighting, what some people will excuse for a
fleshtone will really make you retch once you find the fleshtone place and live there,
in some ways i will be making print for the rest of my life, my eyes are working better, who knew?
also: included here as it was in the original magazine is that whole other magazine vito powers,
of which the claim has been made, vito powers does not lie.

ralph barton:
One of many very weird recordings of WZRD shows, I put this on when I
don't want people to stay very long.
eric graf:
this is a recording of a radio show some people i know very well did. dualmono
is this idea of putting 2 hours of content on one cd. the first 60 minutes
are in the left channel, the next 60 minutes are in the right channel.
obviously you can listen to both channels simultaneously, which is what i do
most times in the car. if you pull up next to somebody with this on they will
know what it means to be a cock blocked nasa scientist.

eric graf:
this recording hasn't really seen the light of day since it was broadcast,
it was dutifully copied for terry second dualmono release but didn't make
it out of the closet until now. so its one of those a first in the achive things.

ralph barton:
I made this. These tracks were composed during the time I lived with
my first wife, Kelly. I worked on this for a long time and I was able
to produce something I feel quite proud of, a document that accurately
reflects my mental state at the time. I can't listen to most of this
disk, it hurts my heart. One of my recurring themes is that I keep
people in my life, close, long after the point where they have become
a detriment to my well being. Not long after we started terry
plumming, my wife and I divorced, amicably, since I avoid conflict and
she was getting out easy. She soon remarried, to a norm, and gave
birth to a child. Even to this day I sometimes fantasize about
killing the child.
eric graf:
this is one of my favorite early tp records maybe because i know ralph so
well. i've known ralph for 10 years, he is one of my best friends. he
has been making music all the time i've known him and this is an especially
strange trip made in the way only ralph knows how.

ralph barton:
It's pretty good. The secret is that there are other, earlier Rotten
Milk mash up tracks in existence that rule harder than anything he's
ever released.
eric graf:
those early tracks ralph is talking about, well, some of them are in the
archive as you can see above. this is a noise record.

ralph barton:
The early soft serve shows were all about a delicious kind of
technical incompetence catchy melodies and these hot chicks that El N
Oar would con into performing with her. I think the world of el N
Oar.
eric graf:
i met eleanor and the first thing she told me is that she is serious
into music, and yeah, she's serious. this is her first record with terry
of the three she made with him, and they are all great. her music is
always changing and growing and all that yet this feels authentic to me
in a weird way the other ones don't, this soft serve is soft where the
later ones are harder heading into much harder, but more on that later.

ralph barton:
An important document in the cannon of lo-fi outsider music, John is
an unsettling musical voice. He makes me feel as if I were meeting up
with an old friend after a prolonged period of separation, during
which time said friend experienced severe irrevocable traumatic brain
damage. Important, and genius I suppose, but if I never hear this
junk again in my life it will be too soon.
eric graf:
this record is still amazing and any polachek haters out there better
shut their traps. he is a lost ramone. when he played the empty bottle
for the tina release i thought i would die, everyone's reaction there
was intense, i don't know how else to say it. his deconstruction of
here comes the sun is better than the original. i mean, shit, he can
make a beatles song sound okay! fuck the beatles.

ralph barton:
This is a good disk to put on if you are fucking peaking and you want
to listen to three records at once and really blow your mind. When we
started terry plumming we had no idea that the artist we were working
with might actually have to do something, anything, for terry. ignint
mcnugget has never done anything to promote this disk, which I resent.
eric graf:
i guess dan meyer is still in ohio. i miss him, he's fucked up. hi dan!

ralph barton:
A real clueless bird, Moira is now out in California trying to make it
as a straight pop singer. I hope hell freezes over soon so's I can
hear her new stuff. On this one track disk, the best part's in the
middle where she abruptly stops for eleven and a half minits of
silence. Once I wasted most of an early rm vrs. bs rehearsal hitting
on Moira only to hear half of a co-dependant phone conversation to a
boyfriend. Never seen her since, but she's still my freindster and
her picture is hot.
eric graf:
man ralph is harsh! you are just as clueless as anybody! maybe he meant
it sarcastically but i doubt it. this is good because you put it on and
then you forget it is on and then it starts again and time goes out the
window. the repetition the repetition.

ralph barton:
I was not involved in picking most of the music in the terry plumming
catalog. I don't even know who made these disks and I've damn sure
never seen death factory perform. For a long time I was convinced
these were among the most worthless cdr's ever burned but then this
one time in western Mass. we were coming down off acid watching this
soft-core arty s&m spanking video and we put in vol. 2 of death
factory and it ruled. It just goes to show you there's a time and a
place for everything.
eric graf:
i really have nothing to say about this record. i've used it as sound-
track before and it works yeah, its some hellish noise. i think it
intends to be creepy but that doesn't work on me. i would call it
informative in re: improv in chicago circa 2004

ralph barton:
I made this with Tilly. Before the divorce, during the trial
separation phase, I moved in with this cat. At the time I was pretty
obsessive about sculpting tracks on my computer. Tilly was always
coming in my room, in a friendly way that made it hard to work. So I
started putting a microphone on him and pushing him to make these
certain sounds. A writing session with Eric and Nat at the Hideout
yielded most of the lyrics.
eric graf:
this record is way too long but has some amazing moments, this is the
first of the maze recordings and i wrote a lot of the lyrics, but let
me say that when i say write i mean i wrote some stuff and gave it to
the machine that was the maze and let what happen happen. it was really
fucking hot, like 100+F everyday when this was being recorded, you can
almost hear the heat. if i remember correctly this was recorded with
one mic with no overdubs, except for the few obvious mixes. strange pop.

ralph barton:
I got this new synth, a Roland SH-32, and as I was testing it out, my
friend, impressed with its huge cheezeyness, told me that "[I] should
put out an album of this stuff and call it Bubblegm Shitface" Not a
friend I see very often, he was quite surprised to see the name he'd
coined appear in the Chicago reader a few years later. This record
was completed, start to finish, in one week. I'm not particularly
emotionally attached but neither am I ashamed and people always seem
to comment on the "worst thing ever" track.

ralph barton:
I like Brian loads, have known him for many years now even we are both
affiliated with another record label, Retinascan. I don't own a
working cd player. I haven't heard this cdr in so long that I have no
idea what it sounds like, but Brian is a super nice person, you should
buy him dinner if you ever get the chance.

ralph barton:
Rotten Milk used to collaborate with this kid a lot. Now he's back in
Japan I think. He was always playing out. Real good sense of what
kind of abstract intellectual noise people would actually listen to.
I wonder what he's up to now?
eric graf:
koutaro is a great guy. he did the last track on tp2 which is a really
great upbeat ending for that overly sour compilation. that comp was
real angry but i don't think koutaro could get angry, i never saw him
lose his cool.

ralph barton:
I could use the same blurb from tpr13 except change japan to somewhere
in New England working with Anthony Braxton or some other egghead
music person.
eric graf:
a nice piece of improv, i don't know much about it, though. maybe rotten
milk could shed some light on the subject?

ralph barton:
This disk is exactly what it says it is.
eric graf:
what ralph doesn't mention is that this sold exceptionally well.
who'd a thunk it? i guess its like one of those 60's strange comedy
records.

ralph barton:
Fred Lomberg-Holm is like a famous elder in the Chicago weird music
scene. We were all real proud that he would let one of his projects
come out on our cdr label. I had nothing to do with this disk except
assembling the final packages. I did meet Fred once or twice, he
seemed nice. Once I opened for him when he played a duet with Weasel
Walter that was one of the coolest high speed jazz jams I ever heard.
This don't sound like that, however.
eric graf:
i was totally surprised that someone with fred's chops would be
interested in working with someone like terry but he was and we
did. this lightbox concept, where he controls improvisers with
a series of colored lights, thus affecting a type of composition
was a real winner live. fred's got the touch.

ralph barton:
I've done more live shows with this band than anything else I've ever
been a part of. Live, we never played the same set twice. Eric
recorded this and Dave mixed it. I'd never been just the source
material but I liked it, the results are not what I would have made
and that's what I like about this. Dan Layne drew the cover art
during one of the recording sessions, presumably the one where Josh
the drummer from MahJong gave me a bottle of rum to make peace over
some stupid shit.
eric graf:
i loved being in on the recording sessions for this disc, just to
spend time with ralph and milk while this was being made was a treat.
buddy was seriously bombed out by this time and it was the perfect
setting for two serious weirdos to get their weird on. ralph's
lyrical content, though hard to decipher, is really something. milk's
whack rapper line puts the whole thing in a special corner for me,
noise music that is almost like pop music, or actually indie pop,
the message of no message message. of course it sounds infinitely
more interesting than most of the indie pop trash floating around
at the time.

ralph barton:
I was really happy with this one. The Soft Serve part is markedly
more evolved than her earlier disks. Tilly and I recorded the Maze
tracks in my apartment in Bridgeport. At the time he had this smoking
hot girlfriend who made him come late and leave early so I was lucky
to get this much material. Some of these tracks he really steps
outside himself, it's haunting.
eric graf:
suffice it to say i love this record, two great groups in their prime.
it is sad that maze couldn't tour, but they just COULDN'T. you understand,
right?

ralph barton:
I spent a month on the road with these guys. To a one they're
stellar human beings. The Carpet side is some of the hardest jamming
tracks in the whole terry catalog, dirty sweaty Chicago style freak
your spaz jams. Get hurt 'cause it makes you feel alive. Midwestern
noise self-loathing meets killer electro beats.. Safety Pin is one of
the best live performers I've ever worked with. Take any chance you
ever get to see him do anything. One time in the middle of his set he
recounted the entire plot of Karate Kid III in minute detail.
eric graf:
another double ep much in the same vein of the last one, trying to pair
up two groups that would work well together. this one works, too, though
differently, very differently.

ralph barton:
I wrote the liner notes for this project. You should read them.
eric graf:
this was one of the greatest of the terry projects, these recordings were
made during the terry plumming summit (see projects) in a huge concrete
basement. i remember when the improvisers hit this level of volume (which
is still the loudest, thickest sound i have ever experienced) all off the
dust fell out of the ceiling, creating a massive fog. it was an all day
kinda thing, i loved every minute of it. this recording does the room
justice, dynamic, a real symphonic sound. i recorded it, todd carter
mastered it, he did a great job bringing out what was there, i listen to
it often, again, in the car.

ralph barton:
I was on a creative roll with this. At the time I was quite proud but
when I handed off to Eric he was only pissed that I'd made this
instead of doing some other thing. The packaging is flimsy and people
don't really seem to like it so this is probably me being self
indulgent. Cold coins is an ok track.
eric graf:
this record is fucked up.

ralph barton:
Joe is an amazing drummer and true all around creative force. Many
former members of the PRDF were in this band. Unfortunately this disk
kinda blows. We were all surprised that Joe would give us sub-par
work right at the last minit . oh well. Live, this band we the
coolest thing ever. They built sets, had costumes, props, a narrative
thread, the music is fucking loud w/ relentless hard driving beats.
Dan Layne and I used to do elaborately choreographed video mixing
during their shows. You missed it. It was great.

ralph barton:
The most heartbreakingly beautiful track in the whole terry plumming
catalog is on this disk. The tragic love of the octopus and the
spider. One time I tried to play it in the van and Dave made me take
it off because he was crying. I'm crying right now.
eric graf:
this is my favorite soft serve disc in the catalog, she has since made
another, but this one is still my fav. it is the broken pussy disco.
eleanor told me once that she played this for her dad, i wish i could
have been there.

ralph barton:
We had to release this. terry plumming was formed to release music
that would otherwise never see the light of day. I've know Dan since
I was in college. He's an odd bird. This 4 disk set is a massive
exploration of very personal ideas about electronic music composition.
I think the uh, genre, here would be soundtracks for films that don't
exist. We used to say that Dan Layne was an OX back when we were
doing the PRDF.
eric graf:
dan layne's entire 90's output. cuddle up with your significant other
and get the chips and dip out and sit back, turn down the sound off the
sound on the tv, and start a joint. you will notice that this is the
future soundtrack for everything. dan layne IS an OX. ok.

ralph barton:
Another release from a "band" that never performed live. I had
nothing to do with this cdr, I've never listened to the whole thing
and I can't tell you anything about this thing. I seriously don't
know what the fuck we were thinking putting this out.
eric graf:
i really never knew these guys, this came entirely through rotten milk.
i wish it was weirder and less academic but oh well, here it is.

ralph barton:
Another release from a "band" that never performed live. I had
nothing to do with this cdr, I've never listened to the whole thing
and I can't tell you anything about this thing. I seriously don't
know what the fuck we were thinking putting this out.
eric graf:
this is where ralph and i differ yet again. mike hagedorn is great.
this is nearly as great as his all tuba stooges cover band but its
mike getting down with some cats and real listenable.

ralph barton:
I like Jamie alot, this cdr's pretty good. I know he could do better
so I've never really been able to get into this although it's entirely
produced with kids toys.
eric graf:
this record has a great sound, it gets real jumpy and goes real smooth,
sometimes simultaneously. nice outing from pickup.

ralph barton:
Fuck Tom Gillis. This is seriously the lamest thing in the catalog.
I tried to listen to it once, fuck that. This guy disappeared off the
map. I don't know why Dave thought it was important that I spend my
money helping release someone's cdr when they didn't even have it
together enough to give up one memorable moment. I never even had
coffee with Tom. If I ever see him I am seriously going to kick the
shit out of him.
eric graf:
i really haven't listened to this since it was released. i believe it is
the one piece of terry media that sold zero copies, so it carries that
distinction, which is nice.

eric graf:
this 7 inch was made with hardscrabble amatuers and i love the carpet of sexy
side but am lukewarm about it's a trap. they toured behind this and i guess
everything went relatively well. there were two covers for this 7inch.
this is the first mass produced foil print i had done for terry and it
went really well, randall christopher bailey did the art for terry's version
of the cover and its simply awesome retarded. everything randall does is
retarded. also everything carpet of sexy did was retarded, so this is really
a meeting of the retarded minds.

ralph barton:
I have some pretty good reasons to fucking hate these guys but they're
always nice to me let bygones be bygones. These jams are solid they
kinda sound like long lost Can demo tapes. I don't like it that
there's no emotional risks being taken here. Live, these guys lay out
hot sweaty dance jams, they like to make girls happy.
eric graf:
this is a great one, a mahjongg side project, in its prime and real tribal,
which i generally find unappealing, but this record has so much more going
on for it... wait a second this sounds like a mahjongg review. this is the
archive not a record review goddamnit! listen to this none the less.

ralph barton:
I had, have, a major crush on Julia. The kind of crush that will not
go away even though you are getting no signs of reciprocation.
Painful and sweet. She's the coolest person. This music is great.
I've tried so hard not to creep on Julia but damn she makes my brain
not work right. Oh yeah, she had a boyfriend.

ralph barton:
Our proto gay. David's a swell kid. Someday he'll be some kind of
weird superstar. He's got a really bad stutter. Everybody I know
who's got an intense stutter is awesome. I've learned to pay special
attention to a person if they stutter real bad when I meet them. It's
like a sign, a mark, a signifier an auspicious portent. This cdr
don't do it for me, but it is important that we were able to work with
David and help him weird out early.
eric graf:
i love david. we were in the war together.

ralph barton:
I love these guys deeply. This music is seminal. The best recordings
I ever made with Rotten Milk were with Hsan from HTEETH. Someday they
will see the light of day. This summer I got to perform at the
Autonomous Mutant Festival with these kids and DannGreen. That was so
cool. The AMF is hands down the best freak noize party in USA. If
you have never been your life is just a shadow of what it could be.
eric graf:
this is in the archive released from terry for the first time right now,
right here, and everyone is better for it. i'll speak for michael right
now and say that he loves this one. there is a picture of genitals
that he hung on my wall 3 years ago of him holding up the terry
cum rag somewhere in a forest. he's wearing a dress and saying something
very serious with his eyes.

ralph barton:
We tracked this in two differnt two week long sessions on a farm in
rural iowa. It was difficult. I did all the post work at bolozone.
Some people have told me that this was the best thing that I've ever
done. I don't think I own a copy, but I like it.
eric graf:
another personal favorite, this is the fully mature maze with a stripped
down studio on an abandoned iowa horse farm... proof that there is an
iowa mafia.

ralph barton:
There's a few more cdr titles in the catalog. I didn't really have
much to do with them except for collating and spray painting cd labels
type of stuff. Jefferson Mayday Mayday is a real psychedelic cowboy,
we found him in Columbia SC and he's the real deal, a total artist.
the Cave cd is a reissue of two early tapes of theirs. They're great,
rotten milk plays in the band these days, they tour a lot and are
really taking off. Even though cooper peed in my ear on stage in
columbia while i was candy flipping it's never been weird between us,
and i really appreciate that. He produced SkareKrau radio cdr, now I
play in the band and it's fucking cool the band rules and I get to
face hot sweaty audiences. I love it.
The Empty Bottle's free Monday series continues tonight with a double
record release party from Terry Plumming , a local CDR label featuring
experimental ... Skarekrau Radio St. Louis's Skarekraü Radio is
composed of a rag-tag team of ..... Amerika'z Meth Problem II Terry
Plumming's terrorist karaoke supergroup ... "Terry Plumming...makes me
... Snowdonia, of a virus creed; Terry Plumming · interlude · They had
to face quarantine without even a hearing. But, George Sloup, attorney
advisor for the Giant Squid ... soundsfromthepocket The Land Of
Buttfuck Pussy and suprise scene celebrity special guests will make
..., The Locus Of Assemblage ... why the fuck aren't they headlining
the festivals all over the planet? ... Rotten Milk and Soft Serve: Gas
Money CD ... As Logan Bay says on "Lumpen93": "Quite often a Terry
Plumming CD makes me feel as if I'm hosting a seance through an AM
radio and channeling the best of ... Eric Graf, head of Terry
Plumming, was said to have found it in the diner ... Part tina tribute
part noise jam, this disc contains music by 2 girls with guy ... Using
the radio like a principal intrument. These performances will be send
to indy radio ... Music programmed by Chicago CD-R label Terry
Plumming Records: ... Music Jefferson Mayday Mayday live on college
radio broadcasts playing along live ... Record Label, Terry Plumming,
Hard Scrabble Amateurs, Apop ... fucking chicgo st lewis assholes
goona be hear? fuck it i dnt care if u dnt;ps theres an I in .. Record
Label, Pure Innerlight Archives,Terry Plumming,SlothJinni ...
THE2NDHAND The terry plumming summit #1 was a massive success as we
were confused and ... Every afternoon and evening .. "the smallest
house in Urbana" according to the terry plumming tour blog the show
and award the grand prize of a contract with Terry Plumming Records .
...... Fuck art, let's fuck. Everytime I see them, I ask myself "what
the fuck" in a new way. ... dyss.net: > > > 1/17/05::: Terry Plumming
# PIZZATLAS CD RELEASE PARTY: Terry Plumming ... Soft Serve Terry
Plumming's queen of noisy-electro-fuck-pop freakout returns to Chicago
from the West Coast with a backpack full of pedals for this ... Terry
Plumming record release party. The Empty Bottle's free Monday series
..... doesn't get so perfect these days (fuck the vines! fuck the
libertines! ... .. b/w the launch party/show for Terry Plumming, an
audio magazine. ... "Fuck!" I shouted. I picked up the spatula and
threw it across the dining area. ... Have you seen these fucking
commercials? ... my pal the high-energy Mr. Eric Graf, progenitor of
the magazine and record label Terry Plumming and whom you ... SUPER
SONIC SOUNDS FROM THE FUCK YOU MOVEMENT, Crank Sturgeon,
.freematterfortheblind, Bastard Noise, ... TERRY PLUMMING - TINA, John
Robinson, 2 Girls With Guy Names, ... THE MAZE, Stupidistcobraever,
Terry Plumming CDr, $5.00., Powdered Iron Rods ... MIKAWA,
T/CRACKSTEEL, Fuck My Ass, Cipher cassette, $8.00 ... Terry Plumming
offers media solutions to Chicago and the world. ..... Fuck 911.
Rotten Milk (America's Meth Problem, Permanent Midnight) and ... Green
Lantern, Secret Order of the Lamprey, and Rand .. The album was
released in August and the program had 16 TERRY PLUMMING ..... But he
knew, you know; clearly he was fucking with us. ... Journal of
Aesthetics and Protest 7. edmar. ... whore and say something like,
"you know I vatch them fucking on the street from my window. ...
eric graf:
this ep was later made by permanent records, of which i printed the
art for their version. theirs looks great, ours looks terrible. the
music is the same.

ralph barton:
There's some VCDs in the catalog. I made the first one. It's my
definitive statement on video, well that sounds a bit grandiose. I
used to make a lot of video. After VCD O1 failed to blow up and no
one was really into it i decided I wasn't gonna get anywhere with
video. Eric particularly hates the terry VCD catalog. I guess cause
Nate's VCD02 is pretty phoned in and VCD03 could charitably described
as a weak collection of b sides and mix loops after that he wanted to
abolish them all from the catalog i dunno, I still like my videos and
don't really understand why they never really caught on. I wish I had
a laptop and a dv camera so I could work in video again ah well
secretly i'm hoping that the terry plumming archive will be popular in
posthumidity and someone will pay me to go to some weird place and set
me up to make some cool art.
There's a lot more documents in the archive. That's my dad the skier
on the poster for the pentagram show. I made the terrywrist zine with
megen mike and jerry contributing. I'm proud of it, I believe in the
power of low fi. A typewriter paper pens and access to kinkos is a
statement all in itself. The questions for the black whole i wrote.
them's too I'm proud of, the last question was written by matt
mahooley and the internet fuck+terry egg mr. modulous I clicked that
"flag as inapproprate" link, but it doesn't mean shit i going to drink
myself to death leader movement
YOLANDA WARD blogging for terry plumming
BUBBLEGUM SHITFACE BACON.
Aya don't call on this thread people need to get off their mooching,
stealing, sleeping on the ground, and stuffing socks...
BLACK HOLE Fear and Loathing in Cape Girardeau this whore is hardcore.
We double-team this Brit bitch and bring her to tears ramming cock
down her little throat until she's...
yes I do want to help you build a black whole
THE SUMMER OF GET PAID
YOU CANT SPELL ____ WITHOUT _____
pip, time to power douche your ass.fuck the eighties shut up
GREASER!!!Nazis and fascists and warmongers pip has a brain...
ASHEVILLE NORTH CAROLINA
BLOG CABIN remember moira cue?
FROM THE DESK OF TERRY PLUMMING
terry plumming flyer: stranger than fiction
blogging for terry plumming
FALL OF TERRIBLE REPERCUSSIONS- TERRY PLUMMING 2006 FALL TOUR TERRIBLE
REPERCUSSIONS
SVO/WVO GARBAGE ON THE MOON was my plan to raise 100 million dollars
to press one ton of west virginia landfill into a bust of Tupac
sylized in an OLMEC way gold plated and launched with a rocket onto
the moon i have a website www.garbageonthemoon.com and a on it there
is a paypal link you can donate money to help me out with my project
do not contact terry@diabolical.org with your demands
terry plumming was responsible for a number of live performances and
installations that pushed the boundaries of boundaries. When we were
on we blew minds and when we were off we fucking hurt people. the
buddy cave was the coolest thing in the whole city, hands down. Eric
in blackface impersonating Oprah Winfree getting sucked off by a
disabled Iraqy war vet through a glory hole while eating a sloppy
sandwhich, that made people feel uncomfortable, and the 4 pa's
blasting white noise did not help us connect with our audience either.
terry plumming's had the cops called on him more than once. though
his well connected lawyer kept the man from opening the box truck full
of hooded, hog tied "trainees" and for the record it was wrong of me
to kick amy in the head even if i ment to do it softly and I still
feel bad about it.
Oh and a big fuck you to John and Sarah for ripping off Jeb and Vic
terrry during the 2008 RNC you guys suck. Vic wants to send a big one
to Barak Hussein as well for rippin off Jeb in the first debacle in
Mississippi.

eric graf:
brian klein's phots speak for themselves. that prototerryzine is something
that was made for the prdf, with limited tools. it looks like other things
that were made much later. in a sense terry was building up to a point, this
is kinda an early example of that point realized early in, well, proto form.

this comments section here at the end is intended for your use, the other terrys that we
couldn't get ahold of or were too lazy to look up. so please write your own histories here
and eventually if we are insane enough to ever want to approach this data we'll include it
in the official archive. oh and when i say lazy i mean the archive was the longest of all
the terry plumming projects, time wise, but stress wise, terry cries no tears for the fallen
heroes (nearly everyone) or the status bar watcher bored off his ass, kraftwerk playing on
repeat endlessly, or that really sad one playing endlessly, oh but he's dead after all,
isn't he? what will happen now, the fall will not arrive? YOUR THOUGHTS::

07/13/11- the comments section has been disabled for a number of reasons, the most primary
being that it never worked correctly. in future, if you have something to say and think it
should be included in this archive send terry an email: terry at terryplumming dot com.
the previous comments will be added to this archive when the productivity guru is ready.